Racial healing more than skin-deep
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ISSUE: 09/13/07 > OPINION > Racial healing more than skin-deep
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Managing editor Adaeze Elechi is a junior Journalism major. |
On move-in day, I escorted a lost dad to Kennedy from the Wright/Maddox area. On our way, we talked about the media, which somehow turned into a (very civil) discourse about race. The gentleman, who happened to be white, essentially told me black people need to get over slavery and segregation. Holding to these issues, he said, has prevented blacks from being completely integrated into society as equals. He then posed Irish immigrants as the model:
Look at the Irish, he said. They got over being treated badly by society and look at them now. They’re treated equally, and today, nobody cares if you’re Irish.”
“With all due respect, sir,” I said, my mind reeling with disbelief that someone was standing in front of me and telling me this, “I don’t think you can really compare people immigrating to a country by choice and then being treated badly, to people being bought, sold, packaged like cargo onto a ship and then forced to pick cotton and tobacco without pay or any status as full human beings for about a century.”
I do not discredit anything Irish immigrants endured. It was horrible. But the two situations are apples and oranges. Make that apples and rocks.
I told the gentleman this much.
We agreed to disagree and parted at Kennedy Hall, but not before he handed me his business card. He owned a salon.
“Come by sometime,” he said. “I’d love to see you there.”
I smiled through clenched teeth and against all the voices in my head that told me to let the wind carry the card to whatever sewer it pleased, I slipped it into my wallet. (I just might stop by one day just to ask if he does ethnic hair).
In my two years in the United States I’ve had similar conversations with a few people, trying to justify why black Americans will always carry the scars of their past. But in this instance, I was particularly disturbed. This wasn’t a college kid I happened to debate. This was a dad with a child who’s a sophomore in college.
What has he been telling his kids?
I have processed and reprocessed what he said to me. I thought of times people have told me celebrating Martin Luther King Day doesn’t let people get over segregation and the shameful times in America’s history. But don’t we commemorate to rremember where we have come from, where we don’t want to return?
George Santayana, in the early 1900s, wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So by black people remembering who they are (whether vocally or silently), and trying not to let themselves or their country forget, preventing them from moving on and fully merging into society? Let me ask this: Even if black people let it all go, would they ever be entirely integrated? As fully as the Irish are today? (That question’s up for debate: I have no answer).
I will say this: I think people need their past to have any kind of future. This country, for all its flaws, is dazzling because it’s history is both unbelievably ugly and incredibly beautiful. I believe anyone who calls himself an American automatically bears the scars of his father, whether it be the child of slaves or the descendant of slave-owners. I believe all people should remember their past because it is part of who they are. I believe we should make peace with it, and work toward avoiding our ancestors’ mistakes.
So to the gentleman’s comment about black people getting over themselves, I say this, and I speak for myself: I, as a black person, will always have my people’s history etched into my life. I’ve made my peace with it, but I never let myself get over it. “Getting over it,” means falling into the ruinous trap Santayana warned against.
